When do we get to the mindful bit?

Remember this badge which was all the rage on knitters’ project bags in the the twenty-teens?

I’m tempted to say that keeping a lid on your homicidal tendencies is a pretty low bar for knitting to reach on the stressed-out-to-calm ladder. I’d like to think our knitting gets us to a bit of a higher (or calmer) plane than that, but let’s agree that the sentiment is still good, and if poking pointy tips into stitches is keeping you away from more morally and legally hazardous pastimes, that’s definitely a plus.

Notwithstanding the whole being in-the-stitch-moment thing which us knitters undoubtedly have, I still think it’s important for us not to get too smug about our grasp of the mindfulness rail.

At a Beginners Class I ran some time back, a particularly exasperated new knitter who was struggling with all the steps of the in-round-catch-off stitch routine, eventually blurted out..

“When do we get to the Mindfulness bit?!“

Conversely a recent Sweater Club graduate found the dopamine hit they got on completing their first sweater, so great that their knitting has become un-put-downable. And far from taking them to a stress-free state of calm, they’ve become competely over excited and obsessed about their next 10 projects.

Somewhere in the middle of all this is that wholesome place where your knitting turns into a friend who fits comfortably into the nooks and crannies of your life. It’s with you to while away the time of a train journey, and transforms an otherwise dull evening in front of the telly, into a hat for someone whose head really needs it. It turns the grumpiness of waiting for your unpunctual pal to show up at the cafe, into just the space you needed to pick up stitches for the sleeve. The tedious hours you’re held in a soulless departure lounge for a delayed flight can become that time where you finally nail the tricky short row section in the yoke. But here’s the thing – when your friend shows up, or the airport announcer says you can finally board the plane, or when the movie ends, it’s ok to put it away and think about other stuff. There’s a reason it easily stuffs back into your bag. It will hold on and reward you regardless of whether you get on with it again the minute you’re on the plane, or whether it’s left idle for another year. It will expand and bloom to fill, or curl up and shrink to fit wherever and whenever.

We may be living in an age of obsessions, where your hobby is your tagline, and the internet learns to woo you with endless temptations that take you futher and deeper into all the accessories and stuff that just make it all more intense and crazed. But it’s worth remembering that the knitting itself is not about any of that. It’s just you and the stitches and the thing your hands are making. Where I think we really want to get to is that place where we can let go of the rest – the other things you want to make, or the people you want to kill (hopefully there are not too many of them), the accessories you covet but haven’t got yet – and you will find that part which I think is what they call the mindful bit (although I have to confess that I’m still not sure what that really means). You may never really know when you get there, because one of the greatest things about it, is that when you’re there, you’re just knitting and it’s ok.